Welcome to A&D!

Hello, and welcome to A&D magazine (its kind of a blog). I don't like writing much but it felt appropriate considering today is the official launch day of A&D. So I guess I should start at the beginning.

Way back when me and Alayza were still living in Michigan, I had just dropped Alayza off at work at the dentist office, and I'm driving down a country road avoiding the crater sized potholes Michigan is famous for while listing to 4 hour work week on YouTube. And I'm desperately trying to think of the perfect business that combines photography, and makeup, but also something scalable and if I'm honest something that sounds cool when you say it to other people.

And I hear the words in my head perfectly "magazine" and I knew right then that was it. So me being me, I research like crazy "how to start a magazine" and everything I see on the internet at the time(around spring 2015) was "print is dying!". I didn't care. I knew there had to be a way, and I stumble upon blogging. I'm reading all these articles about how much bloggers are making, and the traffic they're bringing in, and how its the future of print media. and I'm like "Cool, maybe this is how I can still have my magazine".

I had no plans on leaving Michigan at the time, but we had ran out of friends to convince to model for us for photoshoots, and we were at a loss. But I do my best thinking when I'm alone in the car and the idea pops in my head the exact same way "magazine" did. This time I heard "Your moving out of state." And I was like "damn, I guess were moving out of state." I didn't want to tell Alayza "I think we should move." just yet because I knew she immediately start packing. So again I start researching potential cities. LA,NY,CHI,DC, and finally Dallas. So fast forward a couple of months and a 17 hour drive later, were arrive in Dallas. A brand new city we've never visited full of determination.

1826, our first apartment here in Dallas. This is where it all started for us. Our first blog Focused on Beauty actually did really well. Our first post had 27,000 readers and we kept at it for about 4 months. The problem was we hadn't seen a Nickle from affiliate marketing, or google AdSense and we had rent to pay. So the blog was finished. But due to the blog and networking our popularity and social medias took off. It was on around 3k followers but it had given us careers and pretty soon we were both working full time in our chosen fields. And for the next 5 years we just put our heads down and worked, but recently the magazine idea kept popping up in my head.

So we decided to go for it again, and that's how A&D was created. I want A&D to not just be an online magazine, or a blog, but a hub for all of me and Alayza's creative projects and somewhere to exist off of social media, that's just ours. And somewhere to build a cool online community. So today Oct 1st 2021 is our official launch and honestly I'm a little nervous which is new for me but I really want this to go well. So I hope you enjoy, and Welcome to A&D!

-Deon Casey

P.S. I love that it took me an hour type this and its a 3 minute read...